Page:Oregon, End of the Trail.djvu/147

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Social IVelfare

PIONEER Oregon had a simple formula of social welfare: work was provided for those who could work and aid for those who could not. Whatever latter-day society has added to the homespun tradition has been brought forward by trial and error methods in a state which still has vast unexploited natural resources and, theoretically at least, offers more opportunities than many other states.

If the present results of Oregon's efforts to provide aid for the indigent young and old, hospitalization for the physically and mentally ill, and rehabilitation for criminals may seem inadequate in some respects, it should be remembered that most of the state's present social welfare institutions are comparatively young, and were established to complement a robust pre-depression economy.

Few persons in the opulent 1920*5 anticipated the havoc that falling prices and dwindling markets might work upon Oregon's great lumbering and agricultural enterprises, or that "seasonal" work—long a convenient stop-gap measure for spring and summer unemployment — might fail to halt a rising tide of indigence, swollen by the migration of thousands of desperate persons from the drouth areas of the middle west. It is significant that the editor of a prominent newspaper recently questioned the necessity of organization among the unemployed, intimating that opportunity still knocked at every man's door in Oregon, even if not so loudly and insistently as some romanticists would have us believe. In Oregon, as elsewhere, the Federal Government has entered into the relief field upon a tremendous scale, and the number of the unemployed apparently makes the continuation of Federal aid imperative. The achievements of the Federal agencies— the WPA, PWA, NYA, and FSA—are a warm penumbra between the bright accomplishments of Oregonians who have striven to keep alive the best pioneer tradition of mutual help, and the darkness of insufficient relief, the thin slops provided on soup lines, and the county poor farms for the needy aged.

Until the beginning of the present decade, Oregon's legislative assemblies, drawn from a state with many diverse geographical sections